Monday, day five of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival (and day one for me) is in the books, and it was a memorable one.

Monday's highlight was a brief but memorable sit-down in the CNN Films Lounge on Park City's Main Street with the driving forces behind "Life Itself," the documentary based on the memoir of Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic (and so much more) Roger Ebert, who died last April.

The film, which I saw before leaving for Utah Monday morning, follows Ebert over the last few months of his life as he coped with the recurrence of cancer. It's stunningly candid depictions of Ebert's disfigurement due to previous facial surgery, and his frustrations with the loss of the ability to speak or eat, are balanced by warm, equally candid recollections from those who knew him during his five decades as a journalist, television personality, and blogger. "Life Itself" was directed by Steve James, whose 1994 documentary "Hoop Dreams" was lauded by Ebert (and longtime TV partner Gene Siskel), and which is being given a 20th anniversary screening this year at Sundance as well.

Talking with James, it was evident how much he valued the trust placed in him by Ebert and his wife Chaz to chronicle this extraordinary life during its difficult final chapters. And sitting with Chaz Ebert, whose emotional stake in the film obviously can't be overstated, showed her to be every bit as warm, charismatic, and genuine as she appears in the documentary.

I also had a chance to sit down with directors Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz about their new film, "Land Ho," an amiable road movie of sorts about a pair of retiree ex-brothers-in-law who take a trip to, of all places, Iceland. Katz, a Portland native who also shot his previous film, "Cold Weather," here, and Stephens met at school in North Carolina. They talked about the rationale behind their decision to co-direct and gave some pointers for any tourists headed to Rekjavik and environs.

The first movie I actually saw at the festival was Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton's follow-up to last year's "Touchy Feely," a coming-of-belated-age comedy called "Laggies." In it, Keira Knightley plays a woman who, 10 years out of high school and still postponing adulthood, befriends a 16-year-old (Chloe Grace Moretz) and ends up falling for her dad (Sam Rockwell, refreshingly playing the grown-up in a movie for once). It lacks some of the eccentricity and zip of her previous films, but still packs some memorable moments.

Directly afterwards was "The Better Angels," a black-and-white rendering of Abraham Lincoln's childhood in 1817 Indiana done in the dreamy, mystical style of Terrence Malick. Malick was one of the film's producers, and director A.J. Edwards has worked on three of Malick's films. The visual tropes that seemed so engaging and poetic as recently as "The Tree of Life," though, increasingly verge on self-parody, from the whispered voiceovers to the fetishization of nature to the inevitable shots of women in dresses twirling in tall grasses.

The final film of the evening, "Calvary," was the best. Writer-director John Michael McDonagh ("The Guard"), playwright and director Martin's brother, serves up a pitch-black comedy that might be one of the most Irish films ever made. Brendan Gleeson has rarely, if ever, been better as a thoroughly good parish priest saddled with a thoroughly unappreciative small-town flock, who's told by an unseen parishioner that he's going to be killed in a week's time as perverse revenge for the crimes of the Catholic Church. Chris O'Dowd, Aiden Gillen, Kelly Reilly and Isaach de Bankole co-star, as does the invaluable character actor M. Emmet Walsh.

Tuesday's lineup includes Michael Winterbottom, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in "The Trip to Italy," a follow-up to their hilarious "The Trip," and an interview with the trio; Jason Schwartzmann as a frustrated novelist in "Listen Up Philip;" a pair of baseball documentaries about, respectively, Portland's beloved 1970s Mavericks team and controversial major league pitcher Dock Ellis; and, if the flesh is willing, "The Voices," the latest film from Marjane Satrapi ("Persepolis").